EUPHUISM AND ARCADIANISM 91

has been the object of the minutest critical investigation. The
amount of intellectual eneigy and acumen—and of intellectual
dullness—expended on this man's \ eiy second-rate work would have
sufficed to set up a whole establishment of Greenes, and would have
astonished tiie wntei himself, who, accoidmg to his fnend Nashe,
"made no account of winning credit by his wotks . . . his only
care was to have a spell in his puibe to conjmeup a good cup of wine
with at all times " l He was, in shoit, a journalist, always living
from hand to mouth IP the literal and also in the literaly sense j
prepared to <fc yark up a pamphlet " in a night and a day just " as
well as in seven year," - and to make further capital out of any
idea, motuc or plot that had proved lucrative in othei hands. This
was not the way to produce literature ; and Giccne would be re-
membered, if at all, solely as an expert bookseller's hack but for his
having fortuitously suuck out a feitile line in his cautionary pam-
phlets on cony-catching, so making a contribution to the beginnings
of realism. His other work, apart from his journeyman productions
for the stage, consists of moral stories or collections of pieces in the
euphuistic style, and of pastoials and romances after the manner
of Sidney. He never attempted anything on a large scale j and
while, like Sidney, he borrowed fieoly from the Greek romances, he
did not try foi the same amplitude and complexity, but kept as a
rule to the brevity of the Italian novella.

The facts that we have of Greene's life could all be put Into a Greene's
short paragraph, and are familiar to most people. Besides the facts hfi
we have what is worth more, touches of kindly observation from
his intimates, not to mention the unfriendly statements from other
quarters which put them on his defence. Between the two we can
compose a fair likeness of the man. Born in 1558, he left Cambridge
in 1583 with the degree of Master of Arts, obtaining the same
distinction a few years later from Oxford. At Cambridge he had
probably read Enphues> and perhaps the Arcadia, of which there
were copies going about.0 In the first blush of his enthusiasm for
Lyly he wrote his prentice work, Mam\lia> of which the first part
was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1580, but not published

1 " Four Letters Confuted " (Work oj Thomes Nashe, ed. R B McKerrow, i.,
P *87).

* Sec p 93, n. z.